Suggestion: ban pulse audio (Page 2 of 2)

@epidenimus - It turns out that the additional packages removed when purging libpulse0 are metas, which makes sense.  The meta refers to a fixed set of packages, so if you excise part of it, you no longer have that meta.  Compare table d'hôte vs. à la carte.

@~HP - I'm pretty sure libpulse0 by itself doesn't do anything other than take up space on the hard drive.  As far as I can tell, purging it hasn't broken mplayer on my system.

Last edited by pvsage (2010-03-14 15:12:41)

True, without the pulse server it does nothing.

Pulse is a bad deal. I get rid of it, but somehow it comes back or finds a way to torment me from the grave. It's like the bad relative of audio servers that sneeks in, loots all audio signal, kicks your cat, eats the last of the cookies and takes up shop in your favorite chair. So...........

+1 to infinity and beyond.

Hi everyone...This is my first post, so u'd know how much I really dislike PA
My last experience, on my Karmic 64bit install, PA did not make a sound on my M-Audio 2496 card. When I removed it, ALSA took over and (almost) everything worked like a charm.

So, yeah, +1 to no PulseAudio for #! 10.

I'm shocked at the performance improvement I got by removing PA.

+1 to kick it to the curb.

You never know with polls and threads like this. But my impression is that PA caused a lot of people grief, and most users just want audio to work and not have to think about it. So as long as it works for the majority of users (with or without PA), more advanced users can always change things if they prefer to (for example, by installing PA).

apart from mplayer disliking pulse (since it tries to load it first in the standard config) I really don't notice it much... but you've got my support in removing pulse aswell since I know how much trouble it has caused for a lot of people so far.

+1

At the risk of sounding unpopular, my experience of pulseaudio has actually been quite good.  I remember the first time I installed it in regular Ubuntu (around Feisty I think), and was like "Wow, I can play CS:Source in wine and listen to music at the same time!"

I tried building a light-weight Ubuntu system from scratch (kernel+apt, then start installing packages) a while back, ending up with something basically like crunchbang (except fluxbox, not openbox).  After reading a lot of comments on the web about pulse being heavy and useless, I decided to try a pure ALSA setup (OSSv4 had given me a lot of grief - though that seems uncommon).  I found that while I had no trouble with multiple apps playing sounds simultaneously, I couldn't work out how to change the volume of apps independently.  I was primarily testing with mplayer and audacious.

Once I installed pulse into the mix (with pavucontrol), I could instantly do this.  So, while I agree that it may be more in keeping with crunchbang's philosophy not to include pulseaudio unnecessarily, I think that some of the PA bashing that's going on might be a bit unwarranted.  Yes, PA does add yet another layer to what may be an already over-complex system, but it does seem to fulfill its functions very well.

If someone can tell me the proper way to give apps independent volume control with just ALSA, I'll recant the preceding happily and probably never look back

I am tired of the snap, crackle and pop of the pulse audio krispies in some apps.

+1 to ban it.

Free your Software -- Free your Life

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Well....pulseaudio.  Start advertising Crunchbang on Ubuntu and Fedora forums as "One of the few that doesn't use pulseaudio" and the problem is, it will probably crash the server with folks trying to download it.

Pulse audio, as the developer complained--his complaint was that people were saying this---is a solution in search of a problem. Aside from breaking Skype for awhile, breaking sound for many, being a general nuisance, and showing no improvement over previous alsa sound, I can't think of a reason to ban it. 

Reasons against banning it---avoiding previously mentioned overload on servers.

@73ChargerFan, doesn't seem to be, or at least nothing I've tried yet has pulled it in as a dependency so far.

A couple of days back I tried the above with PA just to see what would happen. Ended up with no audio at all. Possibly missed a step somewhere, not sure. Anyway, I'm using ossv4 now. It's *mostly* working right.